Not only does rotating them help keep stress at a minimum, it will lead to a barracks of soldiers of consistent levels. Having characters be excluded from missions to relieve stress guides the player to constantly rotate their parties for dungeons. You could buy equipment upgrades for your team or you could spend that gold relieving your main healer’s stress to get them out in the dungeons again. All the activities that help characters require money and will take that character out of the action for a while, unable to go on missions. It is in the town that stress becomes a resource management mechanic. There, characters can take part in activities like drinking, praying, or gambling to forget their problems for a while and reduce their stress. The easiest way to relieve stress is in the hamlet, the main hub of the game. Some characters have skills that will heal a small amount of stress, there are camping abilities for longer missions that relieve stress, and it’s always a smart idea to focus on enemies that deal in stress damage at the beginning of an encounter. There are things that can be done during a mission to reduce stress on your team.

HP is the immediate concern in a battle because that will most affect if the character makes it out of a dungeon alive, but stress is, to quote the game, a slow and insidious killer. Stress builds and builds on a character until they finally snap, like they were a rubber band being pulled too far.Ī character’s stress meter basically works as a second health bar, but while wounds and HP are healed instantly after a mission is complete, the psychological scars and stress carry over. A heart attack instantly reduces a character HP to 0 and puts them on Death’s Door or kills them outright if they already have no HP.

If stress continues to build for a character whose resolve has been tested and it reaches 200, they have a heart attack. This either gives them a flaw, like paranoid or hopeless, which will make them act on their own during battle to the detriment of the party, or make them virtuous, which gives them a positive characteristic, like heroic, that they can use to destress or buff their party members. When a character’s stress reaches 100, their resolve is tested. All characters have a stress gauge that goes from 0 to 200 and stress is inflicted by a multiple of sources: enemy attacks, curios, low torch light, and even walking backwards through a dungeon.

The stress mechanic in Darkest Dungeon ties into the games Lovecraftian themes and portrays the deteriorating mental state of warriors as they encounter unknown horrors.

Darkest dungeon stress spirals